County steps in to help tenants facing eviction at Lincoln Hotel

The 31 low-income tenants facing eviction from the Lincoln Hotel in downtown Portland have found an ally in Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury.

Before a Jan. 10 press conference announcing the development of a single resident occupancy-style apartment complex, Kafoury met with Marc Jolin, the director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and Shannon Callahan, the interim director of the Portland Housing Bureau, and asked both of them to develop a plan for providing assistance to the tenants of the Lincoln Hotel, which will close this spring, she said.

Occupants received 90-day eviction notices on Dec. 21, due to the retirement of the building’s managers and the decision of the hotel’s owner, Goritsan Investment Properties LLC, to close the hotel.

“These are potentially 31 vulnerable, low-income individuals who need to figure out where they’re going to live next or else they’re going to be on the streets. And that’s not acceptable,” Kafoury told Street Roots.

It’s not clear at this point what the Joint Office of Homeless Services or the Portland Housing Bureau will do.

Marc Jolin, the Joint Office’s director, confirmed Kafoury directed his office to see how it could intervene with the Lincoln Hotel, but said it's “too early to say” what can be done.

“The first step will be an information gathering exercise to better understand what exactly is going on there, and then figure out what the potential solutions are,” Jolin said.

One of the first steps, he said, will be reaching out to the building’s owners and management.

He did not give a timeline, but said the Joint Office will “move quickly,” given that the Lincoln's tenants must move by late March.

Many of the Lincoln Hotel’s tenants are elderly, low-income and have been residents of the hotel, located on Southwest 10th Avenue and Morrison Street, for decades.

The hotel charges between $440 and $550 in monthly rent, making it one of the cheapest places to live in downtown Portland.

Tenants live in individual rooms, with shared bathrooms on each of the two floors. There is no communal kitchen.

As a result of the ordinance Portland City Council passed last year – mandating that landlords who issue no-cause evictions or raise the rent by 10 percent or more in a year provide tenants with relocation assistance – the Lincoln Hotel must provide its tenants with money for moving costs. Tenants who live in a single room will receive $2,900, and those who live in a double room will receive $3,300 to help pay for the cost of physically moving, security deposit and first and last month’s rent.

In the last few years, as Portland continues to experience a dire shortage of affordable housing and rising rents, impacting low-income citizens the most, the Portland Housing Bureau has become more aggressive in intervening.

Last September, the Portland Housing Bureau announced the purchase of the Westwind Apartments, a 70-unit SRO building on Northwest 6th Avenue and Flanders Street with extremely low-income tenants.

The housing bureau intends to demolish the Westwind and build a new 70-unit building that will also have supportive services, such as case management and access to treatment for mental illnesses and drug addiction, attached to the building.

The housing bureau purchase the building for $3 million using funds from the city’s $258.4 million housing bond, which was passed by voters in 2016 to preserve existing affordable housing and build more.

The Joyce, an SRO hotel on Southwest 11th Avenue and Stark Street with 69 rooms that rented between $19 to $50 a night, was the last hotel in downtown Portland that offered weekly stays and was low-barrier, meaning managers accepted people who were intoxicated or under the influence of drugs.

Dozens of SRO hotels that were once located downtown have closed in the last two decades due to building owners’ decisions to sell their property. The Joyce may have faced a similar fate, but news of the Joyce eviction came months after the Portland City Council declared a housing state of emergency. That made inaction unacceptable.

Central City Concern, one of the city’s largest social service providers, now operates the hotel.

Callahan, the housing bureau's director, told Street Roots that buying the Lincoln “is not necessarily off the table.”

She said her bureau has not yet reached out to the Lincoln Hotel’s owners or property managers. She also noted that the hotel, with 30 units, is relatively small.

“Sometimes, with buildings like this, it’s not clear what our path is,” Callahan said, adding that it’s not clear how much the building would cost, whether renovations would be required or how extensive they could be.

It is unknown what Goritsan Investment Properties LCC intends to the do with the Lincoln. Dean Sandow, an attorney with Farleigh Wada Witt, which represents the Goritsan family and Goritsan Investment Properties, declined to comment.

Kafoury said it will not always be possible to buy buildings and preserve the units, due to cost and other factors. But, she said, “We’ve got to look at it.”

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